Patch 3.0 Is Coming To PTR! But…
But Judgement is still broken in Beta! Hammer of Righteous is also still doing physical damage! I’m pretty sure there is a few other bugs but I’m not in beta and I kindda lost track of the list thus far. Still, my point being… Isn’t it a little too early Blizzard? Why the rush? There was a speculation that right after Activision-Blizzard merger, there was a decision from the top management to fix the release date to November/December. While the developers are still pretty happy in reassuring us that it will be ready when it is ready… Somewhat I have been feeling that it has been a bad rush. Paladins should have been worked on in Alpha and not Beta! And now everything should be fixed first in Beta and not to be released in PTR first!
Your priorities are wrong Blizzard!
And then there is this fellow who agrees with me in a more elaborated way…
The talk of the beta town lately is the recent announcement that 3.0, and with it the WotLK talents and abilities, will be going Live in a timeframe of weeks.
“The coming weeks” does not suggest a lengthy period of time.
I haven’t been in beta as long as most (only a couple of weeks) but I will tell you right now that WotLK is not ready for release.
There’s still time to implement and test content. With 3.0 does not come Northrend, nor does it come Northrend’s dungeons and raids, nor does it come with Northrend’s battleground or World PvP. What does come with 3.0 are class talents and abilities.
Those aren’t ready either.
A number of classes have received almost no review throughout the entire beta process. Shaman and Rogues come to mind as classes that both have not had any serious class changes throughout the beta and have still-NYI talents that nobody’s even been able to test. Murder Spree, the Combat 51-point, has never worked and nobody has any idea how powerful it will or won’t be. If the talent goes live a week before 3.0 and it turns out it’s horrible and needs a total rework- well, rogues certainly won’t be happy. My finger isn’t exactly on the pulse of the Shaman community but I’m sure they have many unanswered concerns.
Another class I’ve been following is Mages. Mages did have a back-and-forth with the Devs, but it abruptly stopped and the devs went off to other classes. Mages still have a number of issues that were never addressed or arose during the Beta process. For instance, the Arcane tree is almost completely untestable from a PvE DPS standpoint because Arcane Blast’s mana cost is ludicrously high and more than likely bugged (1000 mana or so at 80). Arcane Blast is a spell that needs a lot of feedback that can’t be given due to sweeping changes to its mechanics.
I’m sure that Shaman, Rogues, and Mages aren’t alone in their concerns for their class and still feel that a lot more work could be done. These are simply the classes I follow the most closely.
This isn’t meant to be a complaint or a QQ post. It’s not a criticism of the fine work you’ve done so far on the expansion. I realize this is Beta and there is still work to be done. I am simply concerned.
How much time do classes who have gotten very little developer attention lately have to test their abilities? How long will they have to wait for some of their talents to even be implemented?
Which classes are done, which classes are not, and how many changes can we expect for classes who have received very little attention?
If a blue takes the time to respond to this, thank you very much for addressing my concern. I love the expansion very much so far, and would hate to see it dragged down by a rush to meet a deadline.
Other players, feel free to add your own thoughts on the matter. Bear in mind, this isn’t a doomcrying thread. This isn’t a complaining thread. This is simply an attempt, partially of concern and partially of curiousity, to see where classes are standing at the moment and where we hope to see them go.
Spot on. But Tigole was being rather brief on the reply and never quite addressed why things in such a rush without things first being ready in Beta.
None of the classes are done. They are still being iterated on. 3.0 will be on the PTR’s soon. There is still a lot of testing before 3.0 would go live to public servers.
If you look back at past patches, we’ve had patches on the PTR for over 2 months before.
Yea still… you don’t need the extra datas Blizzard. Fix the bugs first!
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rewind said,
August 28, 2008 at 10:34 pm
I think that the PTR actually gives them something they did not want in the Beta, which was pre-made char copies. I think I remember seeing a blue-p some where stating that pre-mades would be available, but on another system, and not the current beta realms. I think the move to the PTR gives them that. Obviously with basic 3.0 it won’t be about running around Northrend.
Kalenian said,
August 28, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Blue said that they’d have premade lv 80s iirc… those wouldn’t be on the ptr.
Kalenian said,
August 28, 2008 at 11:27 pm
I do agree with J though. With each and every beta patch (and they are coming about once a week), vast and sweeping changes are taking place. Beta is not the place for vast and sweeping class and game mechanic changes, Alpha is. Everything should be pretty much totally designed and in place in regards to these things BEFORE beta starts. The point of beta is to more extensively test a more stable form of the alpha.
I’m rambling a bit, but overall I feel like this is more of a public alpha rather than a beta. With so many abilitys NYI and so many MASSIVE changes (list of classes still being promised huge changes: everyone but hunters and warriors) it just doesnt seem like it is testable. I worry about the 3.0 patch on the PTR because then you will get every moron that wow has playing with the talents at lv 70 in great gear complaining about how OP such and such a class is. Remember 2.0? Ret paladins killed people befor HoJ was gone and then healed themselves to full in one heal. Hunters 2 shotted clothies. Felguards could solo people. Once you were fully dotted, you were DEAD with nothing that you could do to stop it. The game was not balanced around lv 60 in 2.0, it was balanced around what was expected at lv 70. However, large nerfs to hunters, felguards, dots, and paladins still happened because of the lv 60 complainers. I have a feeling that a similar thing will happen in 3.0. The talents are balanced around level 80, yet because something is OP at lv 70 there will be unnecessary nerfs that classes won’t be able to recover from (paladins and hunters come to mind).
rewind said,
August 28, 2008 at 11:41 pm
Thx for correction on the premades.
Thinking now, and seeing the argument, it may be that the PTR does give them something the Beta doesn’t, and that is a consistant, known world (pre-Northrend) on which to truly test and gauge the talent/spell rebuilds, AND only that. Right now in beta they are playing with the classes and the world. Setting up the PTR for testing just the class specs, with no new content, will put the emphasis on class balance there.
I think the problem is that publically the PTR has become synonymous with Pre-Production, and that means that changes are close to going live. I think that this, like mentioned, is further from the truth, and it is just “separating the wheat from the chaff”, so to speak.
Kalenian said,
August 29, 2008 at 2:38 am
The issue is, the new talents are not MEANT to be balanced at lv 70. They are meant to be balanced at lv 80 with all of the new gear and abilities that we get along the way. For example, resto druid talents are balanced around the assumption that they have the spell Nourish which they won’t get til lv 80. You CAN’T test for class balanced at lv 70 because, like I said, the talents are not MEANT to be balanced at lv 70. Would you nerf a class because it is overpowered in the 40-49 bracket? Of course not, the game is not meant to be balanced around the 40-49 bracket, it is meant to be balanced around max level. In the same way, you can’t nerf a class that is overpowered at lv 70 when the talents and abilities are balanced around level 80. Due to the mass crying about certain classes (which ones, i dont know, but I have a feeling that it will include frost mages and ret paladins) that will occur on the PTR though, and looking at the way blizzard handled 2.0 at lv 60, I bet that they will be swinging the nerf bat to appease the masses.
Robert said,
August 29, 2008 at 2:50 am
Has anyone considered that their ptr team might be a different set of programmers than the lich team? The reason I say this it that the ptr can test very specific things like game mechanics for new abilities. Hammer of the Righteous is a good example. The distribution of responsibility that Blizzard may be trying to do should make everyone feel better. Sharing the burden of the expansion with a team that is already in place and whos resources and procedures are already in place is a sound business move especially if they are up against a new Activision deadline. Heaven forbid the guys at Blizzard get some professionalism pumpled into their already successful formula.
Kalenian said,
August 29, 2008 at 3:51 am
I think it’s pretty obvious why a horrendously unfinished product like 3.0 is coming to the PTR in the “coming weeks.” To try to kill the hype of Warhammer Online’s release and to keep WoW players from trying it.
Robert said,
August 29, 2008 at 4:23 am
is it obvious? wow has transcended pop culture in ways that no rpg has been able to in the united states. even when squaresoft originally released the first final fantasy, it was considered a bust compared to its popularity in japan. the patch going on the ptr has little to do with the serious gamer. the ptr is not a live server and if warhammer is up and running, and you want to try it, you are probably going to do it. now, yes, i will concede that there is a chance you will get back to wow faster if you are one of the hardcore gamers who is trying warhammer, but you would probably be trying it out whether the patch was hitting the ptr or not.
there is some competitiveness involved here, but lich is already 21 months behind schedule (remember blizz said they would be releasing an expansion every year. tbc was released in january of ‘07), and im sure the patch has as much to do with warhammer, as it does with getting lich out for the holiday season, but lets not forget that wow has goen beyond the hardcore gamer and the masses are less interested in warhammer than the people who bought on on release day.
Temperedseal (Aeonin) said,
August 30, 2008 at 3:57 pm
with blessing of might matching battle shout one or the other will need to be taken…luckily for us improved blessing of might is kind of necessary for ret paladins, yet warrior’s commanding presence (the equivalent to IBoM now that the base for both might and BS is 550 and IBoM is set back to 25%) is not so much a requirement for a fury warrior. Some of you might think this is a bad thing–but.
2 notes:
GBoM lasts 30 minutes ( > 2 minutes)
Fury warriors will be able to grab talents they usually had no room to grab, as well as some arms warriors going into the fury tree–which now will not be nearly as mandatory.
Our one problem now seems like it may be mana retention, but I’m not so sure all the fuss over Judgement of the Wise is anything really to be upset about just yet with judgement of wisdom already giving us a ton of mana back and also crusader strike being able to proc both seals and the judgement effects–In other words I’m not really worried about Judgement of the wise being an issue.
Proudfoot said,
August 30, 2008 at 5:28 pm
The Judgements of the Wise nerf is a larger issue then you think. In PVP we will be vulnerable to mana burn teams again and then we won’t be doing anything for DPS. This will lead to the continued lack of Paladins in high end PVP. In PVE it doesn’t “replenish” enough mana to keep up sustained DPS and we’ll have to switch to seal of wisdom to regain mana thus loosing DPS.
Hopefully we’ll get a buff to the ability or a self buff to mana regen.
Temperedseal (Aeonin) said,
August 30, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Judgement of wisdom scales with AP, but in pvp I would assume that it mostly gets insta dispelled which is where the problem lies.
Proudfoot said,
August 31, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Seal and Judgment of Wisdom were given the same treatment as JotW. The seal restores 4% of total mana per proc and the Judgement restores 2% per proc. This is a big nerf over what the old Seal and Judgement did since they scaled with AP/SP.
Elitist Jerks have done the math and apparently a Ret paladin using a basic DPS rotation without Consecrate will go OOM in less that 3 minutes. That includes using your one potion and Divine plea. It would be less that 2 minutes if you don’t use those. The mana return from judgement of wisdom and Judgements of the Wise is nowhere near adiquate. Somethings gotta give… Blizz just broke Ret again.